1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a concentration gradient test reagent kit and a testing method for use in bacterial/fungal drug susceptibility testing and falls within the technical field of drug assay apparatuses and assay methods.
2. Description of Related Art
Common methods for use in performing susceptibility testing on antimicrobial drugs include a paper method, a dilution method, and an E-test method. The paper method for performing drug susceptibility testing is a qualitative testing method which is convenient but provides little information to compare and choose between susceptible drugs. The dilution method includes broth dilution method and agar dilution method. The broth method includes the tube dilution method and the microdilution method. The tube dilution method often requires intricate operations and thus not suitable in voluminous or batch tests. Although the microdilution method requires smaller amounts of reagents and specimens than the tube dilution method, the microdilution method is not only more complicated but also less clear in result reading than the tube dilution method. The agar dilution method is more suitable for tests involve large amounts of specimen, but is not suitable for occasional tests of sporadic clinical specimen, requires the preparation of a drug-containing culture plate and at the time of testing, and quite cumbersome. Although the E-test method has certain advantages of both the paper method and the dilution method, e.g., the convenience of the paper method, and the ability to determine MIC of the dilution method, it is expensive and not as accurate in terms of MIC results. Thus, common methods for performing antimicrobial drug susceptibility testing according to the prior art no longer meet people's needs.